What is Iron Man if not US military propaganda?
Pooja Singh
The history of US interventionism - which stems from America’s self-positioning as the leader of the free world - is guided by an innate sense of American exceptionalism. Spearheaded by the need to protect US interests in an increasingly hostile world, this history is long and bloody.
The horror unleashed in Afghanistan is unfolding in front of us every day. Eighteen years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, reports from The Washington Post and New York Times have shown that the Pentagon lied about Iraq’s active WMD program at the time of invasion. America under Biden’s presidency might not be playing an active military role in Afghanistan anymore, but the USA continues to control as many as 750 military bases in approximately 80 countries around the world.
This perpetual imperialistic militarisation of the world at the hands of the US military is not a self-sustainable project. To legitimise this enterprise, the Pentagon has to continuously manufacture popular consent in the eyes of the American public. To do so, it often holds hands with America’s most potent soft power tool: Hollywood.
Iron Man is a product of this union. One of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)’s most beloved and commercially successful superheroes, Iron Man took to theatres across the world in 2008, and the MCU never looked back. In 11 years, the superhero featured in 10 movies, which have generated a total of $12.22 billion in box office earnings.
Ask any ardent MCU fan - including myself - and they will tell you that Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, contains multitudes: “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist”, “Earth’s best defender”, “DaVinci for our times”, to name a few. And while he is all those things, he is also a shining beacon of American exceptionalism and the perfect salesman of US liberal interventionism.
We can draw defining poetic parallels between the Iron Man narrative and US military projects overseas. Iron Man's actions, as portrayed in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Spiderman: Far from Home, continue to have ghastly consequences for the people who don’t have access to his wealth and privilege.
This power imbalance is akin to the lingering imperial presence of the US in countries where American troops have intervened, even long after it has made an 'official' exit from them. More importantly, Iron Man 1 and 2 manage to reflect upon the contemporary geopolitical landscape in more substantial ways.
Courtesy of @peachcrisis on Twitter.
In Iron Man 1, we see the superhero being kidnapped by and fighting Ten Rings - a terror outfit based in the hills of Afghanistan. This is a significant plot development not only because it propels Tony’s transformation into a superhero, but also because it play directly into Hollywood’s long-standing oriental tendency to construct generalised negative narratives of Muslim people.
This stereotype has generally been focused on the Arab world, as Jack Shaheeh points in his book ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People’, but in the post 9/11 world, depictions of Afghanistan have followed a similar trajectory.
Under this model, Muslim characters, particularly men, are generally shown as radical terrorists, greedy, corrupt and yet somehow incompetent oil sheikhs, patriarchal lecherous individuals or a combination of any of these. For instance, in London Has Fallen, Agent Banning kills a brown-skinned terrorist with a vague Arabic name while delivering dialogues like “get back to Fuckheadistan, or wherever you’re from.”
TV shows like Homeland and 24 have also regularly played into the stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists, or at the very least, it is perfectly normal to suspect them of being one. Maytha Alhassen’s report titled “Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them” provides an excellent analysis of the deep entrenchment of this Islamophobic narrative in Hollywood projects.
Iron Man escapes the scrutiny for such stereotyping because it simultaneously makes use of what Mahmood Mamdani has termed as the ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ dichotomy in his book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror”.
This distinction is made between Yo Hinsen - the doctor who saves Tony’s life and his captors. Yinsen speaks many languages including English, wears a Western-esque outfit, and wants Stark to have a better legacy than his weapons being wrongfully used by “those murders”. Of course, none of these signifiers shed a light on Yinsen's relationship with or practice of Islam since there is no one way to be a practicing Muslim.
However, these characteristics become important when considered against Tony's captors. The Ten Ring terrorists are donned in various versions of the traditional ‘perahan tunban’, speak Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Russian, Farsi and other languages except English and use illegally obtained Stark weapons to kill innocent civilians.
This distinction, as stark as it may appear, is nonetheless futile because the construction of ‘Bad Muslim’ is such that it deems all Muslims to be bad. To be a ‘Good Muslim’ means to publicly distance oneself from Islam and assert one’s Muslim identity only in ways that is acceptable to the non-Muslim, which in most cases is no way at all. Moreover, by naturalising the terrorist Muslim caricature, this binary fails to address the socio-political origins of contemporary terrorism - much of which can be traced back to US foreign policy - and attributes its origin as being intrinsic to Islamic religious framework.
The setting of Tony’s kidnapping can be compared to America’s Global War on Terror. For one, the Jericho missile that lands Stark in captivity is part of “Stark Freedom Line”; no doubt a clear indicator of the US military’s commitment to liberation. Later, Tony carries on this legacy of liberation by rescuing innocent Afghani civilians from an attack by the Ten Rings using the superior aim precision of his armoured forces; comfortably becoming the white saviour out to save an oppressed people from their Islamic oppressors.
In all the ways that matter, the Muslim terrorists stand distinguished from our American superhero and the US military which is deployed on a foreign soil to fight the good war. However, in reality there is very little difference between the violence carried out by the US military and the organisations like the Taliban as has been documented by the Human Rights Watch over the years.
Nothing confirms the veracity of American exceptionalism like having absolute faith in the idea that the US military only uses weapons for right reasons - even if we have seen the opposite happen numerous times.
Iron Man 2 is bolder in its proclamations. The first 20 minutes of the movie tell us, with the correct amount of charm and cheek, that thanks to Iron Man, “Earth is enjoying its longest uninterrupted period of peace,” America is the most secure it's ever been, and “peace has been successfully privatised” as Tony has become America’s nuclear deterrent.
Strange words coming from someone who belongs to the only country on the planet that has actually fired nuclear weapons rather than using them as mere deterrents.
Later, we also learn that military-industrial complex is dangerous only when the participants are either incompetent people, like Justin Hammer, or when it’s functional in countries like Iran and North Korea, both of which were formerly characterised as Rogue States and are presently termed as “Countries of Particular Concern” by the US. This logic exempts the American military from such suspicion, placing it on an imagined moral high ground.
At one point, S.H.I.E.L.D Director Nick Fury exonerates Howard Stark’s involvement in weapon manufacturing by classifying him as a patriot and war hero, and then vilifies his Russian counterpart for being motivated by profit. Here, it is crucial to remember that it is the Starks who possess a billion dollar empire built on the backs of weapon sales.
In the end, the movie comes full circle as the US Air Force comes to possess its own version of the Iron Suit - War Machine - which it aims to use to fight the good wars. Tony, for his part, starts working with S.H.I.E.L.D, a one-of-a-kind division of US Intelligence that employs extreme surveillance techniques and aims to fight the wars no one else has the capabilities for.
We stand where we started: if America does not step up to the mark, we are all doomed.
So, despite being so blatantly steeped in pro-US propaganda, why does Iron Man work? It works because the narrative already gives superficial recognition to every criticism we can think of.
Iron Man 1 sees Tony being called ‘the Merchant of Death,’ ‘the biggest mass murderer in the history of America,’ and a millionaire made wealthy by war profiteering. The congressional hearing in Iron Man 2 pushes the idea that the military-industrial complex is dangerous, albeit only in the wrong hands.
Our hero overcomes these allegations not by having some real reckoning against deadly weaponisation programs or military interventions in foreign places, but by using the very same philosophy that Howard Stark used to develop nuclear weapons and Tony used to develop Jericho: “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”
We are left with one observation - America and its weapons are vital to protect all people everywhere.
These revelations require some important reckonings. It is vital that cinema-goers are made aware of the political affiliations between Hollywood blockbusters and US foreign policy projects in Muslim-majority countries. It is also time that Hollywood executives and screenwriters stop engaging with, and promoting, racist and oriental stereotypes in their films.